The nineteenth century has been remarkable in many ways. It has
developed a new material and social order; but the fact is not as yet
fully recognized that it has developed a new woman--the woman who
works with, other women; the woman in clubs, in societies; the woman
who helps to form a body of women; who finds fellowship with her own
sex, outside of the church, outside of any ism, or hobby, but simply
on the ground of kinship and humanity.
[Footnote 1: _The Cycle_.]
It is not yet twenty-one years since a great daily in New York said
that if a society composed wholly of women could hold together one
year, a great many men would have to revise their opinion of women.
The remark was made apropos of the formation of the first women's
clubs in this country, and was echoed on all sides publicly and
privately. It is only significant now as showing the isolated position
of women, and the general impression which prevailed that they could
not and would not work together, except, perhaps, for some common
cause, religious or philanthropic, which for the time being absorbed
their energies and made them lose sight of their personal jealousies
and animosities. Why women should have been believed to be
antagonistic to women it is hard to say. This idea seems to have been
cultivated assiduously by men, and women have echoed it; for it cannot
be denied that the new fellowship that has come with the century and
with the awakening of women to the life which is theirs--the life of
friendship, of sympathy, of enlargement, of interest in affairs, of
common kinship with all that exists in a beautiful world--has in it
something of the nature of a surprise. Is it possible that women may
have a life of their own, may learn to know and honor each other, may
find solace in companionship, and lose sight of small troubles in
larger aims?
These questions have been answered by thousands of women, answered
with tears, after the manner of women, but tears of joyful recognition
of the new day which has dawned for them;--a day of larger
opportunities, a day which comes after a night of ages; for the woman
is for the first time finding her own place in the world. Heretofore
she was only welcome if the man wanted her, and if he no longer wanted
her she was again cast out. But she is now learning that the world
exists for her also; that she is one half the human race; that life,
liberty, and the pursuit of whatever is good are as desirable for her
as for the man, and as necessary in order to put her in _rapport_
with the eternal springs of all life and its varied forms of activity.
The first impulse of the awakened woman is to unite herself with other
women; her next to learn that which she does not know in regard to
art, literature, peoples, races; the countries she has never visited,
the kinsmen and kinswomen she has never seen, and the degree in which
their progress has kept pace with or gone beyond her own. This
knowledge comes to her through her club or literary society.
The woman's club has become the school of the middle-aged woman. It
has brought her up to the time. It has enabled her to keep pace with
the better advantages given to her sons and daughters. It has put an
interest into her life which it had never previously possessed, and
made her more humanly companionable because better able to judge and
more willing to suspend judgment. The clubs of women in America--the
growth mainly of the past twenty years--can now be counted by the
hundreds, and their membership by many thousands, and the history of
them all is practically the same.
It is this woman, born of women's clubs, who is the woman of to-day.
She is the centre of the intellectual activity of townships and
neighborhoods all over the country. She forms stock companies, and
builds athenaeums; she is at the head of working guilds; she organizes
classes, teaches what she knows, while she is being taught what she
did not know; and in mental activity, and labor which is not routine,
has renewed her youth, and added to her attractions. She is at the
same time far removed from a lobbyist. She is able to look at
different sides; she is socially at home with the best people in every
sense of the word. She is a lady as well as a woman, and does not
adopt what is _outre_ in order to obtain notoriety.